God Mode: A LitRPG Adventure (Mythrune Online Book 1) Read online

  GOD MODE

  ©2020 DEREK ALAN SIDDOWAY & AJ CERNA

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  Print and eBook formatting, and cover design by Steve Beaulieu. Artwork provided by YAM. Pursuit sphere artwork by Andrea Montano.

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  Contents

  ALSO IN SERIES

  1. Launch Day

  2. Welcome to MythRune

  3. The First Quest

  4. Blockhead

  5. Lesser is Morer

  6. Skilled Labor

  7. Ghoul Me Twice

  8. They Have A Cave Ghoul

  9. Death on Repeat

  10. Rest for the Wicked

  11. Rest Mode

  12. The Sylvad

  13. Third Time’s the Charm

  14. Chief Ugola

  15. Cheater, Cheater

  16. Partners

  17. Rest Mode

  18. Bandit Bait

  19. Night, Ambush, Action!

  20. Risky Business

  21. To The Victors Go The Spoils

  22. Rest Mode

  23. Bandit Moon

  24. The Blue Hand Raiders

  25. Bamboozled

  26. My Friend the Witch Doctor

  27. Rest Mode

  28. Torgul the Weaponmaster

  29. To the Ice Spears!

  30. Hidden Tribe

  31. The Frostfang Clan

  32. The Temple of Hoarfrost

  33. Temple Run

  34. Weremammoth U At?

  35. The Arcane

  36. Rest Mode

  37. Firebrand

  38. Yeti-Gain

  39. The Bargain

  40. Take Two

  41. Token Acquired

  42. Bitter Symphony

  43. Sweet Symphony

  44. Rest Mode

  45. The Livermoor Merchant Guild

  46. Rest Mode

  47. The Escorts

  48. On the Road Again 2: Again Harder

  49. Crystal Fen

  50. Unwanted Company

  51. The Slighted Six

  52. A New Low

  53. Plan B

  54. The Rescue

  55. The Break-In

  56. Haymaker

  57. The Immortal Question

  ALSO IN SERIES

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Groups

  *Quest Complete!*

  LitRPG

  ALSO IN SERIES

  GOD MODE

  GLITCH KING

  1

  Launch Day

  I hobbled down the cracked, icy sidewalk, my right hand clutching a recyclable bag stuffed with fresh produce from the downtown market, and my left handling a carrier of cheap Tim Hortons paper cups. At the bottom of the carrier, I pinched the top of a paper bag, whose hot contents grew less appetizing by the second in the crisp winter air.

  I swore as my knee tensed up, a sharp pain shooting all the way down the outside of my left leg. I knew grabbing breakfast and groceries in one go would be ambitious, given the weather and my injury, but today wasn’t the day to complain about my bum leg.

  “What time is it?” I said aloud.

  “The time is seven forty-eight a.m.,” I heard the automated voice reply in my ear.

  I was cutting it close. Even for me. I took a few pained, shallow breaths and turned the corner, keeping my balance on the slick cement as I broke into a lopsided jog. As much as I needed to be careful, I also needed to stay warm. The weather gods were not kind to us this morning, with the temperature sitting at a frostbite-inducing four degrees Fahrenheit, not including windchill. I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to dodge around anyone. I would have taken a slide and eaten pavement for sure.

  The reality was, though, that only complete and utter morons like myself would be out right now. Not only was it blisteringly cold, but today was the launch of the new massively multiplayer online role-playing VR game, MythRune. Yeah, I know. Another video game launch, right? Big deal. But gamers and review sites had been going on and on about it for the past three years. In the next twelve minutes, it’d be live and ready to go. In the next twelve minutes, the most advanced game known to humankind would be open.

  But Danny Germaine, CEO of Germaine Studios, wasn’t one to pass over the opportunity to create a spectacle. Rather than a standard launch, he sought to turn this into an event for the ages. A real Charlie and the Chocolate Factory kind of deal. If Charlie had to play in the Hunger Games to get his golden ticket, that is.

  Over the next three days, gamers would be competing to level up and earn their way into a worldwide tournament, a tournament that could make the winner rich beyond their wildest dreams — unless their dreams consisted of ten million dollars, anyway.

  In short, with less than twelve minutes left until the event of the century, most weren’t dumb enough to spend their time sliding around outside in search of a final breakfast before the grand opening. And that meant —

  My left foot slipped out from underneath me, and I felt another twinge in my already-aching joint. I found myself in an awkward lunge, lukewarm coffee splashing out from the lips of the cup lids. So much for no-spill. A tense exhale escaped my lips as I wavered in place, taking care not to twist my stupid left knee and aggravate my old football injury further.

  A vibration went off in my pocket just as I got my feet under me. My teeth clenched in frustration. I was tempted to send it to voicemail, given how close I was to home, but you never knew with Brandon. I tapped my earpiece with expert grace, somehow managing not to drop everything in the process.

  “Yeah,” I said, taking careful strides.

  “What’s the holdup? You get lost or what?”

  “The holdup is I have a pain-in-the-neck brother whose heart’ll give out if I don’t get him all that organic garbage from the farmers market,” I said with a smirk, even though he couldn’t see me.

  “Hey, that stuff could feed you too,” Brandon said. “Let me guess. You had to get that breakfast sandwich and a donut from Tim Hortons?”

  “It’s my final real meal for three day
s. Can’t help it if I want it to be halfway decent.”

  “You call that decent?”

  “I call it comfort food, bro.”

  “And you blame me for being late?”

  “Do I look like the one with the failing heart?”

  “No, but you are the one with the gimp leg,” Brandon shot back.

  “Ouch,” I said, half in reply to Brandon, and half reacting to the slight misstep I made climbing up the metal staircase to our apartment unit.

  That football injury was the gift that kept on giving, even two years after it blew my chance at a scholarship and any semblance of the good life. But now wasn’t the time to wallow in what-ifs.

  “Brandon, has Unc showed up yet?”

  “He just got here,” Brandon said. “Do you wanna talk to him?”

  “No. I’m pretty much here, but can you have him grab the front door?”

  “Can’t he grab it himself?” I heard Unc’s voice in the background.

  “No, I can’t grab it for myself,” I said, though I knew Uncle Jerry couldn’t hear me. “My hands are full!”

  “How far is he?” Unc said, probably still lounging on the couch next to Brandon’s sickbed.

  “Dude.” I kicked the bottom of the door with my right foot. “Is that close enough for you? Come on, it’s freezing out here!”

  The heavy metal door swung open, and a wave of heat wafted out like the kiss of a tropical goddess — if a tropical goddess smelled like old carpet and dusty heat vents.

  “Doesn’t this thing start in ten minutes or some shit?” Unc asked. “You’re cutting it close!”

  “And that’s why it’s important that you take these,” I said, holding out the grocery bag. I’d wanted a few more minutes to chill with Brandon, but we were down to the wire. And once MythRune launched, every second would count.

  “You’re the boss,” Unc said, grabbing the bag of groceries from me and retreating into the confines of the one-bedroom apartment. “I just hope you know what you’re doing!”

  “Unc, he doesn’t need to hear that right now!” Brandon called out from the other end of the room. His upper body was propped up with a small stack of pillows and scratchy couch cushions I’d pulled from the abandoned sofa down the street two days ago. My little brother turned his attention to me as I scarfed down my bacon and egg biscuit. They forgot to add the cheese, but I didn’t care.

  “Are you still sure about this?” Brandon asked.

  I looked at Brandon and forced a smirk. He’d had a rough few days leading up to the big launch this morning. Now he was trying to put on an act so I wouldn’t worry about him while I was in-game.

  “Sure as I’ve ever been about anything,” I said, echoing my old middle linebacker bravado. I might not have been suiting up for a big game on the gridiron, but the plan of ours was certainly a Hail Mary if I ever heard one.

  “Is one of these coffees mine?” Unc asked. “And please tell me you have a sandwich for me. I ain’t eatin’ none of that organic stuff.”

  “Just because it’s real food doesn’t make it organic!” Brandon said for what must’ve been the seventeenth time. Unc waved it off. If it didn’t come fried or in a box, it was organic in his eyes. “Better watch it, Unc. If you keep that up, someday you’ll grow up to have a heart like mine.”

  “I ain’t no kin to your mom’s side of the family. I got me a John Henry heart in my chest.”

  “You know what happened to him at the end of that story, right?” Brandon asked.

  “He beat the railroad machine.”

  “And then died. Like, of a heart attack.”

  “If I can go out in a blaze of glory like that, it’d be worth it.”

  “Okay,” I cut in. We couldn’t afford to get sidetracked. “Let’s focus for a minute. You’ve got three days to debate dietary pros and cons. I don’t want to mess this up.”

  The plan was actually pretty simple: Enter MythRune and level up my character over the course of the next couple of days. Then win the tournament held at the end of the three-day launch. There were hundreds of thousands of other players who had the same plan, of course. Easier said than done, right? But I had an edge.

  Not only had I participated in the three-month beta test — which gave me early access to MythRune well in advance of the general public — but along the way, Brandon and I had uncovered a hack that would potentially guarantee our victory, if I didn’t screw it up.

  We called it God Mode — a throwback to old-school video games that had the cheat.

  Thanks to his heart condition, most of Brandon’s sixteen years of life had been experienced indoors, and he spent more than his fair share of time locking out people’s keyboards remotely and breaking into poorly encrypted sites. He wasn’t one of those dark web extortionists or anything, though. The kid just liked to see what cracks he could find in the sidewalk. And he just so happened to find a lot of them.

  After digging through MythRune’s beta source code, Brandon discovered a couple of mistakes the developers had missed. Under a specific set of circumstances — tweaking some in-game settings and a few more advanced hacks, the details of which Brandon knew better than I — a player could essentially make his character invincible. We’d had fun playing around with the cheat in beta but hadn’t thought much of it. Brandon had even planned on sending a message to the devs, letting them know about it once MythRune officially launched. That was the point of beta, after all — to work out bugs like this.

  Then two things changed.

  Brandon’s health had been on the decline for years. But six months ago, the doctor dropped the news: unless Brandon had a heart replacement, he wouldn’t last more than the year.

  Fun fact about heart replacements. They’re expensive as all hell. And when you’re a nineteen-year-old with no college degree and a mostly unreported income from freelance work building websites, there ain’t exactly a lot of prospects that pay well enough to buy an artificial heart and a team of surgeons to put it in.

  Fast-forward to Danny Germaine’s big announcement. I’d already been a MythRune beta tester for two months at that point. And with ten million on the line and a potential hack at my disposal? Well, for the first time in our crummy lives, we saw a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel. If there was a one-in-a-million chance I could do this, I owed it to Brandon to try. Even if I ended up in prison for online fraud.

  “More like one in ten million,” Brandon had said when I proposed my idea to him. “Actually, if you look at the projections for the launch weekend, we’re looking at sixteen million players that weekend alone. And that’s not even mentioning your gear.”

  I remembered picking up my VR goggles and haptic gloves defensively. “What’s wrong with my gear?”

  Brandon had just rolled his eyes. We’d both spent those sixty days of beta play cussing out my woefully inadequate gaming setup that met the bare minimum for beta qualifications.

  “Then I’ll get one of those immersion rigs,” I’d said.

  “How?”

  “Do you forget what country we’re in?” I said, gesturing to the pile of junk mail in a basket on the counter. Even in the digital age, people still got junk mail. I didn’t want to know how much it cost the credit card companies to get around the country’s paperless laws. I grabbed the first envelope off the stack and tore it open. “Check it out — I’m preapproved for up to five thousand dollars. Boom. Done. Next problem, please.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Z.” Brandon’s tone had turned deadly serious. “I can’t have you digging yourself a hole just on the off chance you could get lucky.”

  “Look at it this way,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder, “if we win, that hole would be nothing more than a tiny pothole.”

  I didn’t mention what would happen if we didn’t win. That wasn’t an option. I wasn’t even going to think about the possibility of losing Brandon.

  And that was that. I maxed out a preapproved credit card the very next day.

>   Launch day had seemed so far away then, but as I stepped into the pod, I felt a rush of anxiety. We’d gone over everything inside and out, but I still didn’t feel prepared. The odds weren’t exactly favorable, as Brandon had pointed out.

  “Never tell me the odds,” I muttered to myself, quoting the timeless Han Solo.

  The VR rig itself was dome-shaped and roughly five feet tall. The thing barely fit in our apartment living room. When the delivery guys showed up for installation, I think they thought we were pulling some kind of practical joke on them. I didn’t bother asking the landlord if the power and data pull exceeded the limit of our run-down apartment. By the time the utility bill came, we’d either be able to afford a nicer neighborhood or we’d be living on the streets.

  And if it was the latter, I’d at least have one less person to worry about financially. Hey-yo! Dark humor for the win.

  The front of the pod opened to reveal a gaming recliner with silicon padding. I had only sat in it once before, but when I did, I sank into it like a waterbed — only a waterbed that was actually comfortable. You slipped your arms into long cuffs that went up to your elbows. Inside the cuffs, more silicon padding hugged your hands and cooled at your touch. With a press of a button, the rest of the rig closed around you, enveloping your body in the familiar gelatinous coating and lowering the VR headset over your eyes. And with that, full immersion was achieved.